Bring out 6v6 or the game will die

General Discussion
1

This is not a threat. This is a promise.

The failure of Concord and the blowout success of Marvel Rivals shows that there IS demand for competitive hero shooters, and that there is a thirst for innovation and change.

Going from 6v6 to 5v5 was not innovative, it made teams smaller and reduced the scope of the sandbox for the sake of making balancing easier, but that failed and people just cling to broken metas which go stale.

Increasing the size of shots to lower the skill ceiling did not satisfy long-standing players, nor did it adequately retain investment from casuals. It only helped reduce the time between burnout for returning players.

Terminating OW League did not inspire confidence in the strength of the brand. It harmed the legitimacy and authenticity of OW among esports players.

Turning OW2 into F2P Overwatch with less features, less polish, and a Battle Pass/Online Store while having the gall to demand that people pay money for heroes was repugnant.

I’m telling you. Bring back 6v6. Bring back the innovations and rebuild the team of creators and visionaries who were responsible for the meteoric rise of Overwatch.

If 6v6 is not brought back, then Overwatch will die, which is something that I do not want.

2 Likes
2

When this change was made in season 9, player numbers significantly increased.

You can see this directly on the steam stats (although steam is a very small % of the player base)

Also, interestingly, when MR came out, OW numbers on steam went up slightly. Your guess is as good as mine as to why.

When concord was revealed to be a team based shooter at a PS event, there was an audible sigh in the crowd. That game was DoA because people are fatigued with the genre and have limited time for new live service games in their rotation.

MR has something others don’t. Instant brand recognition. It was always going to get bums on seats and do good numbers short term. It’s success will be determined by where it is this time next year.

Did it fail though… Yeah, some people don’t like it, a good number in fact. But overall it lead to a big jump in players, they’re making decent revenue each week/month (something OW1 couldn’t do).

If the tests for 6v6 are a roaring success, we will see it back. But they’ve already said 5v5 isn’t going anywhere and is the main game.

3

I believe Marvel Rivals is atracting a lot of players who never tried OW2. Like MOBA players or simply Marvel fans. Surely when playing Rivals they will know about OW2 and may give a try to OW2 too. Marvel Rivals may be a good thing for OW2.

1 Like
4

It certainly isn’t likely to harm it. The people who’ve moved over and ditched OW complete, seems to be the ones who were disgruntled and barely playing anyways. Ie the “won’t be missed” type.

The audiences seem different, the game play is significantly different.

MR seems like a team beat em up for the fortnite generation.

5

would love to see some form of statistics to back this up. a lot of the hardcore players (including many streamers, ex-League players, etc.) dropped the game shortly after because it sacrificed player skill in favor of casual accessibility.

would love to see the proof for this as well.

Concord could have succeeded on being a hero-shooter but its poor character designs, terrible setting and aesthetic, the platform exclusivity, and non-existent marketing killed it. Nobody wanted to play as the characters in Concord because they were garish, unappealing, and ‘corporate’. They had no personality, they were regarded as ‘ugly’ and nobody wanted to engage in any dialog about it because of how politically contentious things were.
You can’t have a hero shooter if nobody likes your heroes.

Some argue that it could have survived on an F2P model, but that remains to be seen.

Brands aren’t everything.

Just look at all the other superhero slop games that tried to thrive on that and failed, like ‘Suicide Squad - Kill the Justice League’ and the ‘Marvel’s Avengers’ by Square Enix (if anyone still remembers that).
Those aren’t hero shooters, but they’re close.

Marvel Rivals also has something else: a compelling and innovative gameplay loop with a very marketable and engaging aesthetic and tone. Overwatch has that too, but it remains to be seen whether that can be capitalized on by correcting their mistakes.

The game being F2P and being put on Steam lead to a big jump in players.
You’re confusing correlation with causation - the resounding community sentiment towards 5v5 has been very, very negative. People have played the 6v6 modes in Custom Games and the reception to those has been extremely positive. In Role Queue there’s another tank, and in open queue there’s another player. It may make balancing things more challenging, but that comes with the territory of maintaining a hero shooter.

As for 5v5 ‘not going anywhere’ then that’s it, then. If they don’t completely change course and drop it, then the game is dead and coasting on borrowed time. It will be overshadowed by other projects as its player numbers continue to dwindle and the IP fades out of cultural relevancy, followed by Blizzard taking more and more people off the project until it inevitably gets put into ‘maintenance mode’.

1 Like
6

You can see it firstly in the Steam stats. Which, while only a small % of the overall base. Is a sign of the trend. (season 9 was a 16.5% increase, the month after saw a 10.4% gain and then season 10 saw a 33% gain)

I get that you (and I also thought it was a silly change) didn’t like it. But it was a popular change.

Steam stats are publicly available.

It didn’t. Whilst there was some, only about 75k max people played on Steam (now it is around the 30k mark). Most would have been past battlenet users (there was a rumour going round that there was a performance gain playing on Steam, obviously nonsense, but that lead to a few moving). It was such a nominal take up.

Most of the surveys done in the past were pretty split, the winner tending to depend on whos community was pushing it. But I’d say 6v6 won most of the time yes.

If you read the forums, Overwatch has been dead since about 2018. I wouldn’t be too worried. Games come and go.

If OW ends tomorrow, so be it. If it goes on for another 10 years making money, go on them.

Such as OW classic… Where Mr Aaron spoke about the play rates for it. Started well, tailed off fast. Was at a 4% play rate by the end.

Now, logically, the 6v6 role queue test coming up will be a truer test of where it would lie in the grand scheme of OW things, as that’s the format of the game people know, with all the current heroes and modes.

7

given that concord failed for completely anonymous design reasons (and not only), Rivals has not actually “proved” anything in terms of stability: Netease still has to demonstrate that it knows how to listen to the community in the coming months (especially in optimization) as the community is far from “expert” to be able to say already now if it is a balanced game or… well, balanceable, considering the enormous freedom of choice that MR does not give (and it is certainly something that should be noted in the doubts in netease’s balancing capabilities).

I’m VERY positive about the competition with Marvel Rivals, because it means they can’t slack off on quality. But first, they still need to give Netease time to figure out if they can balance their own game, with or without having the right stylistic idea. It takes literally MONTHS to tell, it’s impossible to tell less than a week into the game. :grimacing:

I don’t think 6v6 can “save” the franchise, but for a simple matter of principle: overwatch “2” was not supposed to be an Overwatch that returns to live service. I’ll tell you a secret that might shock you:

Non-veteran Overwatch players don’t care whether the composition is 5v5 or 6v6

everyone (including those who have never played it) finds it silly that Oberwatch 2 did not include a :closed_book:story campaign as promised.

If you ask anyone who has even heard of Overwatch, the first thing they say is

“didn’t they cancel it?” :thinking:

It’s the only thing that made sense of that number on the title, and with or without it, it doesn’t change anything: this game was a PVP live service game and it still is a PVP live service game. :man_shrugging: A new player has no idea what this obsession with 6v6 has to do with it.

If you ask me if they made the mistake of completely canceling 6v6, we agree. If you tell me that “6v6 is superior to 5v5 and will save the game :confounded:” we absolutely disagree, it was enough for the two types of balances to simply coexist (trivially even different arcade or competitive systems). But if you ask me what ruined Overwatch, it’s the hypocrisy of a story that hasn’t arrived and that still begs for “time to figure out what to do” and people are simply tired of waiting for Tracer and Winston who say “we’re back, now we’re back, wait, now we’re back, and we’ll fight Talon, ok? now we’re back immediately… :smiley:” this is what will make it “irrecoverable”.

8

Lmao no it will not die